should leave ourselves so undeveloped bodily.  There is not one man in a hundred who can even raise his toes to a level with his hands, when suspended by the later members; and yet to do so is at the very beginning of gymnastic exercises.  We, as a rule, are strong in the arms and legs, but weak across the loins and back, and are apparently devoid of that beautiful set of muscles that run round the entire waist, and show to such advantage in the ancient statues.  Indeed, at a bathing-place, I can pick out every gymnast merely by the development of those muscles.”

It is the Germans and the military portion of the French nation, chiefly, who have developed gymnastic exercises to their present elaboration, while the working out of their curative applications was chiefly due to Ling, a Swede.  In the German manuals, such, for instance, as Eiselen’s “Turnuebungen,” are to be found nearly all the stock exercises of our institutions.  Until within a few years, American skill has added nothing to these, except through the medium of the circus; but the present revival of athletic exercises is rapidly placing American gymnasts in advance of the Turners, both in the feats performed and in the style of doing them.  Never yet have I succeeded in seeing a thoroughly light and graceful German gymnast, while again and again I have seen Americans who carried into their severest exercise such an airy, floating elegance of motion, that all the beauty of Greek sculpture appeared to return again, and it seemed as if plastic art might once more make its studio in the gymnasium.

The apparatus is not costly.  Any handful of young men in the smallest country-village, with a very few dollars and a little mechanical skill, can put up in any old shed or shoe-shop a few simple articles of machinery, which will, through many a winter evening, vary the monotony of the cigar and the grocery-bench by an endless variety of manly competitions.  Fifteen cents will bring by mail from the publishers of the “Atlantic” Forrest’s little sixpenny “Handbook,” which gives a sufficient number of exercises to form an introduction to all others; and a gymnasium is thus easily established.  This is just the method of the simple and sensible Germans, who never wait for elegant upholstery.  A pair of plain parallel bars, a movable vaulting-bar, a wooden horse, a spring-board, an old mattress to break the fall, a few settees where sweethearts and wives may sit with their knitting as spectators, and there is a Turnhalle complete,—­to be henceforward filled, two or three nights in every week, with cheery German faces, jokes, laughs, gutturals, and gambols.

But this suggests that you are being kept too long in the anteroom.  Let me act as cicerone through this modest gymnastic hall of ours.  You will better appreciate all this oddly shaped apparatus, if I tell you in advance, as a connoisseur does in his picture-gallery, precisely what you are expected to think of each particular article.